‘Drop the dad, keep the baby’ is Chinese women’s new mantra

Shuli Ren, Bloomberg

Just like the Americans, Chinese women are starting to give up on marriages, too. But many still want to be mothers.

A new phenomenon called “drop the dad, keep the baby” is taking shape. Under this arrangement, the biological father agrees to be no more than a sperm donor, while the mother is solely responsible for bringing up the child.

Demographic shifts are propelling the trend. These days, more women go to graduate school than men, and many move onto well-paid but busy professional jobs. By the time they’re ready to be a parent, they might find viable bachelors in their social circles are few and far between. Being a single mother is not ideal, but you have to make the best of a lousy situation. Often grandparents, thrilled to have newborns at home, are more than happy to help.

Conservative commentators have panned this concept, arguing that a child must grow up with a father. But beggars can’t be choosers. China is entering a fertility crisis, and the government must encourage this new way of thinking.

The main culprit is a society that has a rigid, linear view on human life: You do certain things at certain age, and pursue schooling, career, dating, marriage and parenthood — in that order. Last year, the number of registered marriages was only 6.1 million, a record low.

It’s not true young women just want to be childless cat ladies. Among people born in the early 1990s, over 70% have children within the first three years of their marriage, which is not statistically different from those a generation or two older. Rather, it is the lack of marriage prospects that hold them back.

As such, the nascent “drop dad” movement is a gift to a government desperate for newborns. Among OECD countries, over 40% births are occurring outside of marriage, with the trend particularly pronounced among wealthy European countries such as France and Norway. By comparison, the figure is only about 6.5% for Chinese women born in the early 1990s. Encouraging single motherhood is not an admission of a breakdown of traditional family values, but celebration of economic prosperity and independence.

No doubt, Beijing is keen to raise women’s fertility rate. But part of the male-dominated establishment is still obsessed with marriages to the point of absurdity. In one case, a company with 1,200 staff threatened to fire its single and divorced employees if they were not married by September. Its management has been reprimanded. In another, an econometrics professor (and adviser to the government) proposed lowering the legal age of marriage to 18 from 20 for women. China does not have a Romeo and Juliet situation: On average, women don’t get married till 28.

Instead, there are more effective measures to get young, educated women to have children earlier. The current confines of the law are impossible, starting with the first step. Fertility treatments are not available for unmarried females, so they have to do something else, including going overseas, which is expensive, or having an under-the-table agreement with male friends. Surrogacy is not legal, either. And it’s only two years ago that some regional governments began to process birth registrations without asking for marriage licenses.

That the drop-dad movement exists at all shows that China’s fertility problem can still be fixed. But the government must be open-minded and understand that there are different ways of living.

[Abridged]

Courtesy Bloomberg/Shuli Ren